Opinion

After talking about Tribe One, the Digital Gang, yesterday, who use words like: Autonomous, intelligent and connected Democratised, distributed and decentralised Platform, ecosystem and open Reliable, resilient and robust Vulnerable, questionable and fragile Environmental, sustainable and renewable I’m moving on to Tribe Two today: the Analogue Gang. These guys are all about face-to-face, over-the-table, eyeballing…

I was struck the other day by how many words are bandied about so much that they become meaningless. Then realised that many of these words fall into buckets. Then listed the buckets and they fell into two tribes: digital and analogue. The list is non-exhaustive and misses some bits that should be in there,…

Talking about HSBC often drags me into political controversy. For example, when I criticised the bank for not making a stand over the Hong Kong protests, I got a lot of pushback. Frankly, I don’t like to dip my feet into political waters unless forced to and, in the spirit of that thinking, I was prompted…

I’ve grown up angry. Angry with the system, angry with the world, angry with the way things work, angry with me. Not great, huh? I need some anger management. I meet people who are laid back, who are relaxed, who are chilled. That’s not me. I’m a troublemaker. A fire starter. Thing is that I…

As we move from cash to cashless, turbo-charged by the pandemic, there is a fundamental challenge to ATM providers like NCR and Diebold Nixdorf. I had this view back in the 1990s. It’s just taken a quarter of a century to become a reality. In the UK Link, the largest cash machine network, said there…

When I was growing up, my parents drilled into me a number of key reasons to live: get a good job, build wealth, buy a house, get married and have kids. They also made it clear I should not cheat – should not cheat on my partner or employer; should not steal or back-stab; should…

I grew up in a village, miles from the nearest town. I moved to a city in the north after university and then to London for work. I enjoyed my work and yearned to travel. Luckily, my work allowed me to travel. I’ve been to more countries than I care to mention but then, back…

Having watched the emergence of cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for a decade, I have made a firm view. Most of the people involved in this space are deluded and naïve; most of the people involved in this space don’t understand the system or how things work in the world; and,…

I had a bit of a twitter spat with my friend Peter Matza, who has a background in corporate treasury. You can follow the thread from here: The total wealth of billionaires worldwide rose by $5 trillion to $13 trillion thanks to digital transformation and government stimulushttps://t.co/DyaBU46xaQ via @paullewismoney — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) May 14,…

I was thinking about run the bank, change the bank, and the challenges therein. Part of it was down to a conversation that repeats quite often about it being easier to launch a new bank than change the old bank. Something I’ve argued against regularly. Reason being: what are you doing with the old bank, its…